Cormac McCarthy quotes
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“He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”
-- Cormac McCarthySource : Cormac McCarthy (2010). “The Road”, p.138, Pan Macmillan
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“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
-- Cormac McCarthySource : Cormac McCarthy (2007). “No Country for Old Men”, p.267, Vintage
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“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.”
-- Cormac McCarthySource : Cormac McCarthy (2007). “The Road”, p.10, Vintage
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“He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.”
-- Cormac McCarthySource : Cormac McCarthy (2012). “All the Pretty Horses”, p.291, Pan Macmillan
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“Ive seen the meanness of humans till I dont know why God aint put out the sun and gone away.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”
-- Cormac McCarthySource : Cormac McCarthy (2012). “All the Pretty Horses”, p.139, Pan Macmillan
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“Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”
-- Cormac McCarthySource : Cormac McCarthy (2012). “All the Pretty Horses”, p.244, Pan Macmillan
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“Each leaf that brushed his face deepened his sadness and dread. Each leaf he passed he'd never pass again. They rode over his face like veils, already some yellow, their veins like slender bones where the sun shone through them. He had resolved himself to ride on for he could not turn back and the world that day was as lovely as any day that ever was and he was riding to his death.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
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“The man smiled at him a sly smile. As if they knew a secret between them, these two. Something of age and youth and their claims and the justice of those claims. And of their claims upon them. The world past, the world to come. Their common transciencies. Above all a knowing deep in the bone that beauty and loss are one.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“You can tell it any way you want but that's the way it is. I should of done it and I didn’t. And some part of me has never quit wishin I could go back. And I cant. I didn’t know you could steal your own life. And I didn’t know that it would bring you no more benefit than about anything else you might steal. I think I done the best with it I knew how but it still wasn’t mine. It never has been.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“What do you believe? I believe that the last and the first suffer equally. Pari passu. Equally? It is not alone in the dark of death that all souls are one soul. Of what would you repent? Nothing. Nothing? One thing. I spoke with bitterness about my life and I said that I would take my own part against the slander of oblivion and against the monstrous facelessness of it and that I would stand a stone in the very void where all would read my name. Of that vanity I recant all.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
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“They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“They spoke less and less between them until at last they were silent altogether as is often the way with travelers approaching the end of a journey.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“There is no forgiveness. For women. A man may lose his honor and regain it again. But a woman cannot. She cannot.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
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“You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“Remember her hair in the morning before it was pinned, black, rampant, savage with loveliness. As if she slept in perpetual storm.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“I look for the words, Professor. I look for the words because I believe that the words is the way to your heart.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.”
-- Cormac McCarthySource : Cormac McCarthy (2015). “Blood Meridian: Picador Classic”, p.152, Pan Macmillan
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“I will do what I promised." He whispered. "No matter what. I will not send you into the darkness alone.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“They were watching, out there past men's knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“It was the nature of his profession that his experience with death should be greater than for most and he said that while it was true that time heals bereavement it does so only at the cost of the slow extinction of those loved ones from the heart's memory which is the sole place of their abode then or now. Faces fade, voices dim. Seize them back, whispered the sepulturero. Speak with them. Call their names. Do this and do not let sorrow die for it is the sweetening of every gift.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
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“He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.”
-- Cormac McCarthySource : Cormac McCarthy (2013). “The Border Trilogy”, p.268, Pan Macmillan
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“No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.”
-- Cormac McCarthySource : Cormac McCarthy (2007). “The Road”, p.46, Vintage
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“He didn't say a lot so I tend to remember what he did say. And I don't remember that he had a lot of patience with havin to say things twice so I learned to listen the first time.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
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“I think that when the lies are all told and forgot the truth will be there yet. It dont move about from place to place and it dont change from time to time. You cant corrupt it any more than you can salt salt.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“And perhaps beyond those shrouded swells another man did walk with another child on the dead gray sands. Slept but a sea apart on another beach among the bitter ashes of the world or stood in their rags lost to the same indifferent sun.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“Lying under such a myriad of stars. The sea’s black horizon. He rose and walked out and stood barefoot in the sand and watched the pale surf appear all down the shore and roll and crash and darken again. When he went back to the fire he knelt and smoothed her hair as she slept and he said if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
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“This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“Every day is a lie. But you are dying. That is not a lie.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes. Of a certain size and color. A certain weight. When their meaning has become lost to us they no longer have even a name. The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“You have my whole heart. You always did.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
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“The flames sawed in the wind and the embers paled and deepened and paled and deepened like the bloodbeat of some living thing eviscerate upon the ground before them and they watched the fire which does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are divided from their origins and are exiles. For each fire is all fires, and the first fire and the last ever to be.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“If trouble comes when you least expect it then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.”
-- Cormac McCarthySource : Cormac McCarthy (2015). “Blood Meridian: Picador Classic”, p.69, Pan Macmillan
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“It is personal. That's what an education does. It makes the world personal.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“My daddy always told me to just do the best you knew how and tell the truth. He said there was nothin to set a man’s mind at ease like wakin up in the morning and not havin to decide who you were. And if you done somethin wrong just stand up and say you done it and say you’re sorry and get on with it. Don’t haul stuff around with you.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“You give up the world line by line. Stoically. And then one day you realize that your courage is farcical. It doesn't mean anything. You've become an accomplice in your own annihilation and there is nothing you can do about it. Everything you do closes a door somewhere ahead of you. And finally there is only one door left.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
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“He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“From daydreams on the road there was no waking. He plodded on. He could remember everything of her save her scent. Seated in a theatre with her beside him leaning forward listening to the music. Gold scrollwork and sconces and the tall columnar folds of the drapes at either side of the stage. She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“I have no enemies. I dont permit such a thing.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
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“I yearn for the darkness. I pray for death. Real death. If I thought that in death I would meet the people I've known in life I don't know what I'd do. That would be the ultimate horror. The ultimate despair. If I had to meet my mother again and start all of that all over, only this time without the prospect of death to look forward to? Well. That would be the final nightmare. Kafka on wheels.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“He'd half meant to speak but those eyes had altered the world forever in the space of a heartbeat.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
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“I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.”
-- Cormac McCarthySource : Cormac McCarthy (2010). “All the Pretty Horses”, p.197, Pan Macmillan
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“The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
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“Maybe it's like Mac says. Ever man winds up with the horse that suits him.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold, and anything else is just a waste of time.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“In the spring or warmer weather when the snow thaws in the woods the tracks of winter reappear on slender pedestals and the snow reveals in palimpsest old buried wanderings, struggles, scenes of death. Tales of winter brought to light again like time turned back upon itself.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“There is no God and we are his prophets.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
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“Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“you fix what you can fix and you let the rest go. If there ain't nothin to be done about it it aint even a problem. It's just a aggravation.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“You are either born a writer or you are not.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
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“He said that those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
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“Scared money can’t win and a worried man can’t love.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.”
-- Cormac McCarthySource : Cormac McCarthy (2015). “Blood Meridian: Picador Classic”, p.266, Pan Macmillan
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“They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“Nothin wounded goes uphill, he said. It just dont happen.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
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“Words pale and lose their savor while pain is always new.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“They rode like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote. For although each man among them was discrete unto himself, conjoined they made a thing that had not been before and in that communal soul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those whited regions on old maps where monsters do live and where there is nothing other of the known world save conjectural winds.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“He sat a long time and he thought about his life and how little of it he could ever have foreseen and he wondered for all his will and all his intent how much of it was his doing.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“It is community and respect, of course, but the dead have more claims on you than what you might want to admit or even what you might know about and them claims can be very strong indeed. Very strong indeed.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
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“In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don't believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God--who knows all that can be known--seems powerless to change.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“Maybe. Anyway, some men get what they want. No man. Or perhaps only briefly so as to lose it. Or perhaps only to prove to the dreamer that the world of his longing made real is no longer that world at all.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“Just take me with you. Please. I cant. Please, Papa. I cant. I cant hold my son dead in my arms. I thought I could but I cant.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“He thought that in the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime but he took small comfort from it.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
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“For even if you should have stood your ground, he said, yet what ground was it?”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“A dream inside a dream might not be a dream.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“Easy to see that naught save sorrow could bring a man to such a view of things. And yet a sorrow for which there can be no help is no sorrow. It is some dark sister traveling in sorrow's clothing. Men do not turn from God so easily you see. Not so easily. Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from. To imagine otherwise is to imagine the unspeakable. It was never that this man ceased to believe in God. No. It was rather that he came to believe terrible things of Him.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“I didn't mean I'd seen everything, John Grady said. I know you didn't. I just meant I'd seen some things I'd as soon not of. I know it. There's hard lessons in this world. What's the hardest? I dont know. Maybe it's just that when things are gone they're gone. They aint comin back. Yessir.”
-- Cormac McCarthySource : "The Border Trilogy".
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“He had divested himself of the little cloaked godlet and his other amulets in a place where they would not be found in his lifetime and he'd taken for talisman the simple human heart within him.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“By the time I was sixteen I had read many books and I had become a freethinker.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent. He looked about at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked. He nodded toward the specimens he'd collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men's knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“If much in the world were mystery the limits of that world were not, for it was without measure or bound and there were contained within it creatures more horrible yet and men of other colors and beings which no man has looked upon and yet not alien none of it more than were their own hearts alien in them, whatever wilderness contained there and whatever beasts.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
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“The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“But I didn't know what to say to him. What do you say to a man that by his own admission has no soul? Why would you say anything?”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“He poured the tumbler full. Drink up, he said. The world goes on. We have dancing nightly and this night is no exception. The straight and the winding way are one and now that you are here what do the years count since last we two met together? Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
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“If people knew the story of their lives, how many would then elect to live them?”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“If you break little promises, you'll break big ones.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“You say you can't? Then don't do it. That's all.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“Every man's death is standing in for every other. And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the fear of it except to love the man who stands for us.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
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“Acts have their being in the witness. Without him who can speak of it? In the end one could even say that the act is nothing, the witness all.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“They came upon themselves in a mirror and he almost raised the pistol. It's us, Papa, the boy whispered. It's us.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“She said that these were things all women knew yet seldom spoke of. Lastly she said that if women were drawn to rash men it was only that in their secret hearts they knew that a man who would not kill for them was of no use at all.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
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